R.J. Anderson

R.J. Anderson

R.J. Anderson lives in Florida and joined Prospectus in 2011. In the past, Anderson's work has appeared on ESPN, SLAM, and Wired, as well as in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. His nightmares include an endless loop of Hank Blalock playing third base.

The Royals may be the most famous prediction PECOTA has gotten wrong recently, but the Reds have seen the opposite issue.

On Tuesday, Baseball Prospectus released PECOTA's preseason projections. In keeping with tradition, the algorithm has again seeminglyundersold the champion Royals, who have nudged aside the White Sox to become the symbol for outpacing expectations. That status is well-earned: over the past three seasons, the Royals have won a majors-leading 44 games more than PECOTA figured they would. Along the way, the Royals have birthed countless thinkpieces and arguments about every facet of their success: whether it's by design; whether it's sustainable; whether it's duplicable; and so on.

At the soul of it is the truth that everyone wants to be the Royals (the postseason version, at least). The transitive property, then, suggests that nobody wants to be the anti-Royals, a role filled in recent years by the Reds. No team has underperformed its PECOTA projections over the last three seasons by more games than the Reds: they won two fewer games than expected in 2013, seven fewer in 2014, and 15 fewer in 2015. Add those failures together, and the Reds have lost 24 games more than PECOTA believed they would—or six more than any other team over the same stretch:

With pitchers and catchers reporting to Florida and Arizona in a week and a half, it's time to prep for camps. That means, among other things, familiarizing yourself with each team's non-roster invitees. Below is a team-by-team look at the American League, with a focus on a player deemed noteworthy—be it due to their chances of cracking the roster, their story, or some combination thereof.